Politactics: Political Conversations from Everyday Analysis

By EDA Collective

Technology, politics and entertainment have merged to the point of confusion. Politactics, the third book from the Everyday Analysis collective, is a set of conversations about how to sift through this organized but disordered mess and create a framework which could enact change against political and corporate hegemony. An internationalist collection of essays, articles, responses and letters, the book argues that we need a ‘politactical’ mindset in order to develop tactical and practical responses to the situations in which we are finding ourselves politically.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785354373

EDA Collective

Everyday Analysis (EDA Collective) is a group of writers, mostly in Manchester, in the UK, who have been posting short articles on everyday events, phenomena, affairs, popular and avant garde culture, and anything else, online, and have begun to amass quite a following in the blogosphere, in a relatively short time.

Book preview

8.    Notes

1

Prologue: Politactics

i)

This third, short volume of Everyday Analysis writings aims to address and respond primarily to events in the field of politics, a central and perennial theme in our work. It looks to assess the unconscious politactics employed by the powers that are, and to also politactically challenge, and even change, them. It re-presents certain articles that have appeared on our online publications that have focused on political issues and writes ‘around’ them. Thus, the articles excerpted within these pages we approach in certain respects as ‘case studies’, which centrifugally spawn other bodies of text and discussion that draw on their themes and deliberate on their consequences. The title chosen for this book, Politactics, aims to achieve a couple of things. First, in part, to show up the type of accusatory riposte that so tirelessly gets wheeled out in response to criticism of political agendas: that of the ‘but what’s the alternative?’, ‘how would you do it better?’, and ‘if it’s so bad, why don’t you change it?’s. The type of political criticism in question is most often that being made by the Left and these responses often come from a Right who are either in power, and would wish to bar any access to any resources with which an alternative could be attempted to be implemented, or who support this Power and want either to ‘rubbish’ the opposition by mocking their relative impotence (that is, rather, often disenablement) or fully subscribe to a certain realism – ‘capitalist realism’, as Mark Fisher adroitly calls it – the ideological underpinning of which is so tightly sewn up as to make its fantasy appear the only possible reality in town… or both.¹ Secondly, however, the title is also chosen for the reason that we nonetheless do make some attempts within these pages – as far as is possible – to lay out certain forms of tactical response, on which to base a politics going forward, and enough separate attempts to warrant the modification on the word, too, to polytactics.

In some academic circles it has become commonplace to compare politics with a capital ‘P’ to politics with a small ‘p’. This gesture is intended to indicate that while there is a subject called ‘Politics’ (with a big ‘P’), which designates a certain kind of discussion or act, in fact everything that we do or say is or at least should be ‘political’ (with its small ‘p’). The latter point has validity insofar as it forces us to recognise that all actions and comments are grounded in and caused by political conditions and that all actions and comments have political effects. Realising this means realising that there are no innocent and apolitical acts, and that everything needs to be interrogated. However, this primarily ‘academic’ idea has often become little more than a justification for academic thought and discussion not to engage with what it dismisses as ‘Politics’, with a capital ‘P’. Academics may congratulate themselves on making ‘political’ difference whilst ‘Politics’ charges on as powerfully as ever. The end result may be that ‘Politics’ continues to do what it wants and the academia continues to do what it enjoys, whilst pretending to ‘political’ importance. In the end, ‘Politics’ (with a capital ‘P’) will likely cut academic funding before academia realises that it has been shooting itself in the foot in this respect for decades. Thus, the name of this book, Politactics, also looks to respond to this problem and to cut a path across the gap between the small ‘p’ and the capital ‘P’ so that ‘Politics’ is forced into conversation with not only academia, but with other modes of discourse as well. This book is therefore a collection of ‘political’ articles on the subject of ‘Politics’.

Whereas previously we’ve written on the mechanism of a political elite selling the story to its public that: ‘you don’t have to concern yourselves with nasty politics… leave that whole funny business to us politicians’, this contrivance sometimes goes further.² There are those who will criticise non-politicians for involving themselves with – or in – politics at all. One example is the constant questioning of why Owen Jones doesn’t/won’t become an MP (mirrored on its other side with the sentiment: ‘he’ll no doubt sell out and become an MP…’).³ It is this that we also attack ‘politactically’, by emphasising what should be the obvious: one doesn’t have to be a politician to think about, comment on, try to alter the course of, agitate and advocate on behalf of or for changes to, be active or an activist about, Politics (with that big ‘P’; and we hope this is where we may finally collapse the small one into the big).

These ruminations, however, also lead us to a classificatory problem at the heart of this book. That is, how to decide which of the many political articles from our contributors could or should be counted as articles on Politics. In the end, this may be an impossible problem to overcome. If one insists on strict criteria (only counting the articles that directly discuss politicians, governmental policy, or things that existing mainstream media discusses under the heading of ‘Politics’) then one risks proliferating and entrenching the limits and restrictions that characterise our current political system, allowing politics to remain a closed language, which excludes and ignores other types of language and topics of discussion. On the other hand, if we were to follow the university in simply seeing everything as political, the book would quickly become something too far removed from Politics to make any impact in the field, falling into the same trap that the academia often has. In order to attempt to make as big an imprint on Politics as a small book through a left-wing press possibly can, we have in general kept close to what is generally considered Political discussion. To push the boundaries of existing political discourse we have tried to write at the limits of this language, on the edges of what is called Politics, bringing in other things with which politics is clearly and closely bound. The aim: to blur the distinction between politics and Politics, a distinction that has allowed Politics to survive for so long under-interrogated.

ii)

A major theme of this edition is reflected in a passage taken from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia concerning the objective/subjective divide and the mixing-up of this divide’s terms:

The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed. Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective; and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made judgements and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it – that is, the objective.⁴

In our analyses of media we suggest how it is often the case that a news organisation will move a thoroughly subjective perspective into the place or position of ‘objectivity’. For example, terrestrial television channels’ news stories detailing human(itarian) crises often cannot avoid discussion of the effect that these have on the markets, as if costs to capitalism objectively outweigh costs to humanity. The financialisation of everyday life is everywhere in the media; a great majority of tabloid headlines include some monetary figure that we’re meant to assume is a cost somehow to ourselves. Another example comes in the form of a petition that calls for the BBC to refer to David Cameron as ‘the right-wing Prime Minister’ in response to their labelling Jeremy Corbyn ‘the left-wing Labour leader’ at every mention.⁵ Whilst its observation is a ticklish one its point is a serious one: how better to manufacture a version of ‘objectivity’ than to erase every epithet for a certain personage, party or class, and thus present it as a norm to which everything else that gets any precautionary label is an exception? Should this get taken as the norm by readers, listeners and viewers, this will lead to the version of the ‘objective’ that Adorno alludes to, where things become ‘non-controversial’ and their ‘impression’ goes ‘unquestioned’; that is, become subjectively accepted, as reality itself (hence this really being the realm of the ‘subjective’). In contradistinction, what becomes known as the ‘subjective’ is ‘anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made judgements and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it’. That is, if, presented with an object, one does not toe the populist line or offer the stock consensus-reality response, this is seen, even vilified, as a purely subjective intervention; an anomaly, or perversion of the objective. However, surely, a ‘relatedness to the object’ must rather accord with objectivity: it is objective – when confronted with an object – to think about, engage with, ‘cast of all ready-made judgements’ about, and analyse the specificity of, that object.

But to swap these modes of relations and social bonds for one another is in effect to pathologise thinking for the public consciousness as a subjective abnormality, rather than to see it (or allow it to be seen), democratically, as an objective right, utilisable by all those bestowed with the faculties that facilitate thinking. In his Proust and Signs, Gilles Deleuze argues that ‘objectivity can no longer exist except in the work of art’ – that is, in the creative work, or act – and goes on to state that ‘it is no longer a matter of saying: to create is to think – but rather, to think is to create and primarily to create the act of thinking within thought. To think, then, is to provide food for thought.’⁶

To return to our title, it is this thinking, and its acts, pronouncements and changes-to-mind, that can create political and tactical responses and actualities. Indeed, at school we might have been called a ‘keener’ or ‘beaner’ if we thought hard about a piece of work – or we might have called others this if they did – but these stigmas need not hang over into our lives as ‘adult’, ‘independent’, ‘free’ (whatever we like to think of ourselves as) thinkers. (And nor should the ‘results’ we got at school, so often representative of amenability to structures of testing, rather than the ideas we may have had, or tried to advance.) For the ability to think is an endowment of human existence and not a privilege granted singly to the ‘intellectual’ (so often so variegated a figure, of whom an aetiology becomes impossible to pin down or standardise when put under any scrutiny), policy-maker or public enunciator. It is through thought that we may become thinkers (which – as Deleuze has shown – is not a tautology), and we hope that these articles and writings within this book will serve as spurs to thought for our readers.

iii)

Harold Wilson famously said that a week is a long time in politics. This being the case, the time-lapse between the writing and original publication of the articles here presented and what’s occurring now will no doubt be inescapably noticeable, but what should be perceivable as standing behind this is the indiminishable impetus and ethos of the politics here represented. That is, of